It is all obvious or trivial except…

How quaint

Australia’s two largest legacy media organisations recently announced big cuts to their journalistic staff. Many editorial positions, perhaps up to 120, will disappear at Fairfax Media, publisher of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and News Corporation announced the sacking of most of its photographers and editorial production staff.

Both announcements were accompanied by corporate spin voicing a continuing commitment to quality journalism. Nobody in the know believes it. This is the latest local lurch in a crisis that is engulfing journalism worldwide.

Now, partly thanks to Donald Trump, many more people are turning their mind to the future of news, including “fake” news and its opposite.

How, in the future, are we to know the difference between truth, myth and lies?

Hands up everyone who sought the truth in either Murdoch or Fairfax titles….

The actual reason the papers are full of this shit is that this time around it’s the jobs of the people who write the papers on the block.

Second, governments will have to take some responsibility for news and information. In Europe and Canada, they are experimenting with methods of helping bolster journalism.

In a world where even democratic, western governments are more and more becoming the enemies of their citizens, this is just what we need.

One of the reasons why the mainstream media has ceased to be relevant to many people is that it has become fiercely partisan. Left wing governments are not held to account, whereas those of the right are pursued relentlessly. The mainstream media is not averse to using a bit of fake news in the cause of the “greater good”. Fairfax has become a complete joke, its eventual, inevitable demise will be just desserts for its decline into totally unprofessional, partisan politics.

Journalists have been talking a lot about the “anxiety” of Trump supporters who are nostalgic about an era when people like them had a reasonable expectation of decently paid jobs that gave them the security and status to get married and raise a family, and how these economic losers console themselves with “hate” by reaffirming their social and moral superiority over some outgroup.

The journalists who write those articles are often expressing their own anxiety about globalization, their own disappointed expectations, and their own resentment at having to live in a more “vibrant” neighborhood than their credentials should entitle them to.

These feelings become especially visible when they’re reporting on the scandal of legacy American blue collar white guys with spanners, such as in the North Dakota oilfields,getting paid more than for example striving young bloggers in Brooklyn who “specialize in the intersection of gender, culture, and technology”.